Caroline Calloway Survived Cancellation. Now She’s Doubling Down

She continued to make plans after 2017, yet, one by one, they’ve sputtered, conked out. There’s a Reddit thread created by SMOLBEANSNARK dedicated to tracking and annotating her Instagram posts about Scammer. She’s blamed holdups variously on the return of her mother’s cancer, excessive partying, solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Shipping dates have come and gone many times. On November 8, 2020, she vowed that Scammer would be “AT LEAST 400 pages, more likely 450.” (Flash forward: One month after my Sarasota visit, I receive a text. “Scammer update: It’s taking shape before my eyes into more a book of 65 prose poems than a ‘memoir.’ ” Second flash forward: As of the printing of this issue, Scammer has not yet shipped. Neither has I Am Caroline Calloway, nor Cambridge Captions.)

Calloway is still talking, and as I watch her mouth move, the realization dawns: Natalie Beach, c’est moi.

Beach isn’t who I want to be. That, though, is who Calloway has turned me into. First of all, she makes disinterested journalism impossible. You can’t stay detached. She simply won’t allow it.

For example, a few weeks ago, over Zoom, I was listening to her read out loud a paragraph she’d written: “For months, I let a pool boy who is also a plumber fuck me without a condom. I haven’t used a condom in years.”

Unable to help myself, I interrupt. “You should stop having sex without a condom.”

She looks up at me, looks down, then gives a small shake of her head. “Oh,” she says. “No.”

I sigh.

For another example, over a different Zoom, I notice that she keeps pausing to suck on a lemon wedge. I ask her what she’s doing. She’s just taken mushrooms, she explains, and the lemon enhances the mushroom’s potency. I express irritation because I’d blocked out two hours for this interview, and now she was going to be too high to answer questions. No, no, she assures me, she won’t be too high to answer questions. Five minutes later she whispers, “I’m too high to answer questions.” I sigh.

She can be sweet and funny and charming, yet she has no respect for boundaries, personal or professional. In the middle of a conversation, she’ll fasten her eyes on mine, say breathily, “I’ve always thought I’d meet a journalist that I’d be friends with. I really hope it’s you.” Last March, she randomly sent me a video of herself getting ready to go out for the night. She was wearing a minidress and kept flipping it up, flashing her Red Scare thong, and doing this obscene darting thing with her tongue. My sons, then nine and seven, were constantly stealing my phone to watch.

If I continue talking to her, researching her, writing this piece on her, I’ll end up scrubbing the period blood out of her comforter, same as Beach. (Well, Beach didn’t scrub the blood-stained comforter, but she did stash it.) 

Really, though, Natalie Beach, c’est moi because Calloway makes me her collaborator. She needs one more than anybody I’ve ever met. There’s an air of purgatory about her. She’s been locked in a moment for six years, the moment she broke the contract with Flatiron. She’s doomed to try to write the book and fail to write the book over and over. She gives the book different titles—And We Were Like, Scammer, I Am Caroline Calloway—but it’s all, I’m convinced, the same book because it’s all the same story, the only story she has to tell: hers. And yet, for some mysterious reason, she can’t tell it. Not by herself, anyway.